I Programmer Weekly puts all our news coverage together in a handy digest together with the week's book reviews and additions to our archive of new book titles related to programming. The list finishes with the latest articles - an explanation of Reverse Polish Notation numbers and an in-depth look at Decorators in an extract from Mike James' forthcoming book, Programmer's Python.

News

In sci fi virtual reality is much realer than it is in reality, if you see what I mean. For one thing users can always walk around as if there were infinite space, but in reality they are confined in a small room. Now we know how to pull off such a trick - infinite virtual space in a finite room.

Intel AL Lab has open-sourced a library of natural language processing tool, which will be a help to developers creating chatbots and building skills for virtual assistants. It is one of several AI resources made available since Intel AI Lab was launched last year.

Udacity's Android Developer Nanodegree gets up to speed with Android Architecture Components with an important update. This recognizes that the components are growing in popularity and can even be considered the modern way of doing things on the platform.

A book which uses as its sources recently opened government files, personal interview and the archives of major British computer companies reveals a shocking insight into the gender gap that still exists in the computer industry - Britain deliberately discriminated against its most qualified workers because they were women.

The latest Guinness World Record for the largest number of robots dancing simultaneously was set on February 1st 2018 during the San Remo music festival in Rome when 1372 sub-knee-high robots were filmed for a TV show about a group of robots who are determined to learn to dance.

There's a new online resource for gaining a basic understanding of AI. It comes from Helsinki University and tech strategy firm Reaktor, who say they want to make Finland the world's most educated country in the field of artificial intelligence.

Udacity has launched a new Data Scientist Nanodegree program. At an advanced level it has projects designed by Bertelsmann, Figure Eight, IBM Watson, Insight, Kaggle and Starbucks which map to the skills these companies are looking for in data scientists they're hiring.

The latest news is a little, a very little, and very very late. Microsoft has announced that Excel will soon have JavaScript support but only for functions. The spreadsheet is still without a clear way to create scripts.

A highly acclaimed course that teaches programming language concepts with an emphasis on functional programming restarts on May 28th. Aimed at those with some programming experience, it is now presented in three short modules that use SML, Racket and Ruby respectively.

The Core

The Python decorator is one of its most powerful features and it is used to implement many of Python's own internals. It is a simple idea and yet it can be presented in a way that hides its simplicity. In this extract from Mike James' forthcoming book, we take a completely different look at decorators.

Babbage's Bag

RPN or Reverse Polish Notation used to be a basic of the computer programmer's world, but today it is not as well known. Hence there may be some perfectly clued up programmers who are still left wondering what the sausage is doing outside of the bun.